White Star Line built the Titanic to compete with Lusitania, Mauretania

The White Star Line made the decision to build the three Olympic-class ships for sound business reasons, not as an exercise in corporate vanity as has sometimes been suggested. Until the advent of air travel in the mid 20th Century, the only way to cross the Atlantic Ocean was by steamship, and it was an immensely profitable industry. Not only did businessmen have to travel back and forth between Europe and North America, but the rising tide of westward-bound immigrants represented an unprecedented source of income: by 1900 most of the operating revenue for these ships came from the fares paid by their immigrant passengers. Wealthy and titled passengers in First Class were nice to have, but the men and women in Third Class were the steamship lines’ bread-and-butter. Hence, competition for that immigrant trade was fierce, particularly among the German and British lines. The advertising value of having the biggest, most luxurious, or fastest ship on the North Atlantic was a powerful draw to potential travelers.

So at the end of the 1890s, when the German steamship companies Hamburg-Amerika and Norddeutscher-Lloyd introduced a series of fast, luxurious ships that outdid all of their British counterparts, they threw down a challenge which Cunard and the White Star Line could not ignore. Cunard was the first to respond, starting construction in 1905 on two new liners that would establish a whole new set of standards for the transatlantic passengers trade — the Lusitania and the Mauretania. Almost 800 feet long, with a displacement of 33,000 tons, they were half again as large as any of the German ships they were built to best. Fast, luxurious, imposing, they became the most celebrated ships on the North Atlantic passage –and no one else had anything that even remotely compared to them.

The White Star Line had been contemplating their own mammoth ships for several years, and now their time had finally come, and with this trio of new liners Cunard, the Lusitania and Mauretania would be beaten at their own game. If Cunard wanted to build big, White Star would build bigger; if Cunard wanted to offer luxury, then White Star would offer luxury to a degree never before seen on the North Atlantic. Speed would be the only concession to Cunard: its ships had been designed using Admiralty expertise with the latest high-pressure turbines, an area where White Star’s experience was limited. As a result, the ships would be a knot or two slower than the Lusitania and Mauretania. But in every other way, they would surpass–decisively–the two Cunard ships. They would be 882 feet, 6 inches in length, with a beam (width) of 92 feet, displacing 45,000 tons and capable of carrying over 3,000 passengers and crew in a degree of comfort that no other ships could match. They would be named the Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic.

In December of 1908 the keel of the Olympic was laid at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Ireland; the keel of the Titanic was laid at the end of March 1909; the keel of Gigantic would be laid down once the Olympic had been turned over to the White Star Line. The new liners were projected to be ready to go into service in the spring of 1911, 1912, and 1913 respectively.
If everything went as planned, that is….

Kristen Iversen is the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Her forthcoming book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, will be published in June.

Daniel Allen Butler is the author of nine books and a maritime and military historian. Among his books are "Unsinkable" -- the Full Story of RMS Titanic" and "The Other Side of the Night -- the Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic was Lost."

Janet Kalstrom became a docent at the Molly Brown House Museum in Denver after a 37-year banking career. As part of her work as a docent, she dresses in period costume to play Margaret "Molly" Brown at the museum.

As part of the Denver Post's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, we've invited five experts in some aspect of the tragedy to blog for our website. Their fascination with the topic, in many ways, mirrors the enduring fascination of us all with the story of the giant oceanliner that hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. Over the next month, our bloggers will provide us insights into the ship's history, the cultural context of the times and the passengers, including the indomitable Margaret "Molly" Brown of Denver who was aboard the vessel when it went down. One of our writers will even share her experience of participating in the Titanic Memorial Cruise, which sails in April from Southampton and retraces the route of the Titanic on its fateful voyage.